Delivering on Entrepreneurship Commitments: Evidence from Post-Soviet Universities

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‘Entrepreneurialism and Society: Consequences and Meanings,’ a volume in organizational sociology & economics recently released by Emerald Publishing Limited, features a contribution by IOE experts Pavel Sorokin, Isak Froumin, and Svetlana Chernenko that explores the realm of entrepreneurship-centric learning & development in post-Soviet higher education.

Over the decades, entrepreneurship has far and away transcended the domain to which it traces back its inception.

The commitment to entrepreneurship—or rather entrepreneurialism—has become a universal adage associated with an increasingly nuanced and diverse matrix of socioeconomic bonds across what is now a genuinely boundless range of institutional and individual actors.

By and large, there is a wide overlapping in the semantics of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism. Yet, if the former commonly means the process of running risk-bearing ventures for economic and/or social gains, then the latter essentially refers to the meta-dimension of agency and embracing the mindset of an entrepreneur.

When it comes to the educational realm, topics surrounding how universities have been able to advance the acumen and culture of entrepreneurship have recently piqued more interest in the policy, research, and other domains of public discourse. Anchored in a vast wealth of evidence from across former Soviet states, the study by IOE experts Pavel Sorokin, Isak Froumin, and Svetlana Chernenko seeks to yield important new insights into the part that higher education systems have played in helping deliver on the ‘global promise for entrepreneurship / entrepreneurialism.’

Read the paper abstract

The universal “promise of entrepreneurship” has gone far beyond the borders of countries where it emerged. Education systems might play an important role in this process by legitimizing entrepreneurship related myths, principles, and social hierarchies. Surprisingly, against the literature on the role of education in producing and allocating human capital, entrepreneurship education development on organizational, national, and global scale is only emerging as a theme of mainstream academic discussions. This paper applies multi-level approach to get insights on what role might higher education have in promoting global “entrepreneurial culture,” with a focus on post-Soviet countries. We analyze supra-national initiatives, national policies, leading universities’ practices, and the actual characteristics of entrepreneurship education programs in these universities. Our results suggest that drivers of entrepreneurship education development in national higher education systems of post-Soviet countries are not only the “concrete” and “technical” institutional factors on the national level, but also the broader cultural environment. Though institutional environment in post-Soviet countries does not always objectively meet high international standards we found many cases when official policy documents state goals related to teaching entrepreneurship in higher education and there are concrete programs devoted to entrepreneurship education sharing largely similar “entrepreneurial” worldviews. We also found that the actual perceptions and strategies of the actors directly involved in entrepreneurship education practices demonstrate much higher similarity than formally declared education policies in the related countries.